The Most Absurd News, or the Newsworthiest Absurdity?

A decade in and there’s still no good way to do this. He is the incoming president, and therefore the things he says are definitively newsworthy. The things he says are also completely ridiculous, often existing somewhere on a continuum between Marx Brothers-level comedy and 8Chan-level malevolence. This is not a realm that anyone — legacy media, other politicians, even social media really — knows how to navigate reasonably, even now.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Donald Trump said the following:

• “We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.”
• “The windmills are driving the whales crazy. Obviously.”
• [Answering a question about assuring the public he would not use military force to gain control of Greenland and/or Panama] “I can’t assure you. I’m not going to commit to that. It might be that you’ll have to do something.”
• That he might use “economic force” to turn Canada into a US state.

This is a partial list. The question that has confronted every news outlet, and in a different way even every person posting about politics and current events on social media, since 2015 is: what do you do with all that? While there were (generally missed) opportunities in that decade to ignore him, there have also been plenty of times where that is not a reasonable approach; he was the president, he will be so again in short order.

Simply repeating his statements without context would leave an uninitiated reader/listener/viewer both baffled and misinformed — about what wind turbines do or don’t do, about the possibility of renaming a large body of water, about the odd position the U.S. military might find itself in if forced to defend its NATO ally Denmark from U.S. military aggression. Taking the time to factcheck on the air, or inside the confines of a news story, can help sometimes, but it also just lends some veneer of reasonableness to an unreasonable set of statements. All of these demands or grievances or claims generate dozens of news stories on their own — “Trump says he will change the name of Gulf of Mexico to ‘Gulf of America,'” just for example — none of which, I would argue, add up to anything resembling a more informed public.

Again, we’ve had a decade of this. A decade of other press conferences with other absurd claims or promises, with the dozens of news stories sprouting from each like mushrooms on a rotting log, and a reasonable chunk of the electorate that quite clearly has internalized none of the substance and all of the surrounding bluster. Because what he actually says and does makes so little sense, they basically ignore the details and map anything they want onto him — he’ll bring grocery prices down, he’ll fix the health insurance system, he’ll get us out of wars we can’t quite name but definitely feel strongly about. Airing the press conferences and rallies didn’t help; not airing them didn’t help; describing them in this way or that didn’t help; none of it helps.

There are root causes at work here, the sort of deep media ecosystem issues that many have now attempted to diagnose and theoretically cure, and maybe that’s all that matters — maybe what the New York Times says about his ravings (today: “a hodgepodge of grievances, complaints and false claims”) doesn’t have a chance of piercing the propaganda bubble that has been built over decades. But that doesn’t answer the question of what to do with it all when ignoring it is not an option.

There’s four more years of this staring us in the face now, and it feels downright blinding. The media is already forced into literal repeats in some cases — these identical “Why Does Donald Trump Want to Buy Greenland?” headlines are from five years apart. Demands to remake the map of the world require journalistic due diligence, and so here we are, reading the same thing again, or the next version on the next absurdity, wondering if anyone else has learned anything, about any of it, at all.